Homework 7 comments

I’ve gotten a couple of comments and questions about homework 7 and its relation to the previous handout in class, so let me go over the things that I have been asked about.

One: As I mentioned in class, I wound up handing out a handout without having completely updated the trees, meaning that the models in the handout are not really great models. In particular, I left out a bunch of bar-level nodes. The policy in the class is that there is always a “bar” (i.e. NP, N’, N, or PP, P’, P, etc.). I did not follow that convention entirely in what I handed out. I have posted an updated version of the handout to address that.

Two: right at the beginning of the homework, I make a distinction between a wh-question and a wh-object question. That’s not really explained on the handout. A wh-question is any information-seeking question that has a wh-word in it. So, like What did buy? or Who bought the lamp? – both of those are wh-questions. When we speak of wh-subject or wh-object questions, it’s kind of a shorthand. A wh-subject question is a wh-question where the subject is a wh-phrase. So, for example, Who left? is a wh-subject question because it is a wh-question in which the subject (who) is a wh-phrase. And a wh-object question is a wh-question in which the object is a wh-phrase.

I might also add: a wh-interrogative is a wh-question, I for some reason used both terms in the homework assignment. And “wh-phrase” is a more general term that includes wh-words (like who and what) as well as longer things like which book or whose cookie, which are not lone words, but are still wh-phrases.

Three: In part three, I say that you should draw a tree showing the D-structure and draw arrows for movement, and I say that the ending position in these cases is always T. This raises a question about sentences (6-8), which have a modal in them. What I intended there (and which I kind of alluded to at least a couple of times in class) is that a modal does not start in T, but starts lower in the tree, like the other auxiliaries. The case I made for that was that modals seem to inflect for tense like the other auxiliaries do, and so it makes a bit more conceptual sense to let T be T, and inflect the next thing down for tense. So, modals (unlike what we did earlier in the semester) would be in a phrase below T, the head of which will move up to T.

In class I also alluded to the possibility that modals might be their own category, like M. However, we want the modals to inflect like verbs do, so it might be simpler to say that the category of modals is V. There are open issues here that we’ll deal with probably in the second semester of syntax, not this semester, but for the moment, I’d say let’s call the category of modals V. So something like should would be the head of a VP that is just under TP (or just under NegP if there is one), and that modal V would move up to T. (Though: If you want to write modals as being category M, that is ok too.)